Tones

This is a listing and cross reference of the tone phones that are used by the three phonetic alphabets that System.Speech supports. See Phonetic Alphabet Reference.

The table columns contain the following information:

• UPS. The phone label specified in Microsoft’s Universal Phone Set (UPS).

• IPA. The phone label specified in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phone set.

• Unicode. The Unicode value from the IPA phone set.

• SAPI ID. The Speech API (SAPI) phone ID, which in most cases is the Unicode value.

• IPA Description. This column describes the features of the phone. See the Glossary of Phonetic Terms for more information about the features of phones.

• X-SAMPA. The equivalent phone in X-SAMPA for reference.

Tone Phones

Tone describes the use of pitch in speech sounds to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. Lexical tones can follow a vowel or syllabic consonant. They can be made up of simple levels, on a universal scale which has a maximum of five level contrasts, or they can be contours composed of sequences of tones. A sequence of three tones should be sufficient to describe any tone contour.

IPA contains a mixture of lexical tones and contour tones. UPS covers the five lexical tones found in IPA, plus upstep and downstep. All contour tones can be represented in UPS by compound tones.

UPS does not include tonal symbols for the following IPA symbols: Rising, Falling, High Rising, Low Rising and Rising-Falling. These can all be defined in UPS using tone sequences. Global Rise and Global Fall are equivalent to “intonation – fall” and “intonation – question rise” in UPS and are found in Suprasegmentals.